When Blair Corp. changed the e-mail
address it was sending from this fall it sent three notices to
customers about the impending change, asking them to add the new e-mail
address to their address books “to keep receiving our e-mail specials.”
And when the address did change Blair again highlighted the switch at
the top of the e-mail message and reminded customers to update their
address books.

Having Blair in customer’s address books is
the best guarantee the retailer’s e-mails will be delivered without
scrutiny from an Internet service provider’s spam filter, says Darren
Schott, senior director e-commerce. He says the first e-mail blast with
the new address went out last month and that he does not yet have a
complete report on delivery rates and customer responses.

Blair, which is No. 118 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide,
changed its e-mail address because its old address,
blair@blair.messages2.com, had been provided by a previous e-mail
service provider. When it switched providers to Yesmail the company
needed a new address and chose one, blair@e.blair.com, that is a
sub-domain of Blair.com. That way it will be able to continue to use
the same e-mail address if it changes e-mail service providers in the
future, Schott says.

This kind of advance warning of a changing
e-mail address is a new and welcome development, says Chad White,
director of retail insights and editor-at-large for the Email
Experience Council, a unit of the Direct Marketing Association. “That’s
something a year ago we didn’t see at all,” says White, who closely
follows the e-mail practices of large online retailers. He notes that
Williams-Sonoma, No. 20 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide,
also recently sent out e-mails to its customers with a note about a new
e-mail address and a request that it be added to the customer’s contact
list.

“Whitelisting is extremely powerful because
it means those permissioned e-mails are going to automatically go to
your inbox and have images turned on in most cases,” White says. Many
ISPs and e-mail software clients automatically turn off images unless
the sender is in the recipient’s address book.

This kind of communication is easy and essentially free, White says. “You just have to communicate with your subscribers,” he says. “It doesn’t involve going to the ISPs or anything complicated.”